The championship featured professional drivers from various motorsport disciplines, including the Formula One World Championship, World Sportscar Championship, European Touring Car Championship, and other international series, racing against each other using identical modified BMW M1 sports cars.
The championship was introduced as a support race for various European rounds of the 1979 Formula One season, and Formula One drivers were granted automatic entry based on their performance in their Formula One cars. The inaugural championship was won by Austrian Niki Lauda, while Brazilian Nelson Piquet emerged as the champion in 1980 when the series held some events outside of the Formula One schedule. BMW decided to discontinue the championship in 1981 to focus on their entry into Formula One.
The idea of a one-make championship was proposed by Jochen Neerpasch, who also oversaw the construction of the BMW M1 sports car. The original plan was to enter the car in the World Sportscar Championship in 1979 and offer it to customers for other series. However, a regulation change by Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA) in 1977 required a minimum of 400 examples of the M1 to be built before the car could be further homologated for the Group 5 category. To circumvent this, Neerpasch developed a one-make series consisting of the M1 racing cars intended for Group 4.
To attract drivers to the series, Neerpasch enlisted Max Mosley, head of March Engineering, who convinced other Formula One constructors to support the use of the one-make series as a support race for European Formula One events. The Procar Association was established to serve as the ruling and organizational body for the series.
The Procar Championship races were held in the middle of the Formula One season, and the winner of each race received US $5,000. To attract Formula One drivers, seats were guaranteed in the Procar races by cars entered by the factory BMW team. The top five Formula One drivers from Friday practice were assigned to the factory team and guaranteed the first five grid positions for the Procar race, regardless of their qualifying times. Other teams were also allowed to participate, and points were awarded to the top ten finishers. The driver who accumulated the most points at the end of the season was awarded an M1 road car.